Lord Willing and the Creek Don't Rise

It’s tough to hear about flooding in the Mississippi Delta. First tornados, then floods: the weather reports sound like something out of a Biblical prophecy. Of what does the old Negro spiritual warn us? No more water; fire next time. That haunting phrase, based on the Book of Noah, can certainly make you stop and think.

But when I heard an NPR reporter mention Yazoo City, Mississippi, my mind wandered from the current crisis to my early days at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Though my chief duties were in story department (heck, along with Frances Doel I WAS the story department), I was also asked by Roger to help out with graphing the distribution of such classics as Night Call Nurses and Angels Hard as They Come. More often than not, our movies were booked into drive-ins in out-of-the-way burgs I wouldn’t much care to visit. But they had such wonderful names! I distinctly remember that Yazoo City was a popular venue for New World fare. My special favorite, though, was (as I remember it) the Dogwood Drive-In in Palestine, Texas.

The drive-ins were fading away even then, as the land they sat on became too valuable to devote to teenagers in parked cars. In their heyday, however, they set the scene for an unbeatably American combo: the romance of the automobile plus the romantic urges of horny young people, who could barely be bothered to look at the screen. But drive-ins were also frequented by large family groups on small budgets. Jody Armour is now a USC professor of law, but he recalls that in the Sixties, when money was tight, turning off the TV set and going on a family outing to a drive-in was a very big deal: “We’d think about it days ahead of time . . . . If you saw Planet of the Apes, one of the early movies I remember, that really lived with you. You went home and you dreamed about those huge apes that were 25 feet tall on that silver screen in the drive-in.”

In 1968, Roger Corman gave young Peter Bogdanovich a chance to direct a movie that would meld two days of work by horror star Boris Karloff with footage from Karloff’s vintage Corman film, The Terror. Bogdanovich and his multitalented wife Polly Platt dreamed up the notion of casting Karloff as an aging movie actor who is menaced by a sniper at a drive-in theater. It was a brilliant concept for a contemporary horror film, and Targets ended up launching both Bogdanovich and Platt on impressive careers. Three years later, the pair made The Last Picture Show. Apparently the Lord was willing, and both of their lives were changed forever.